8092

• UCREFRP Catalog Number: 8092
• Author: U.S. Department of the Interior.
• Title: Proceedings of the Symposium on Restoration Planning for the Rivers of the Mississippi River Ecosystem.
• USFW Year: 1993.
• USFW - Doc Type: Washington, D.C.
• Copyright Material: NO

Preface

I have often wondered why, at times, I feel such
a sense of outrage and despair even after just
retuming from meetings where we were engaged
in planning the fIrst mitigation project for the
Missouri River, or were informed that someone in
Congress or the Corps of Engineers has an inter-
est in studying the prospect of restoring sediment
movement through a large storage reservoir on
the river, or were told that we might receive the
necessary permits to put a few large trees and
some organic matter back into the Missouri's
channels. Don't these projects reflect successful
restoration efforts?
My state of mind was best explained by Reisner
(1991): "Conservationists tend to feel like born
losers, even if things are going their way." Perhaps
this statement is true because there is such an
overwhelming sense of historic, ongoing, and un-
stoppable loss that is evident every day for those
of us who work with native ecosystems.
Schmulbach (1988) noted that humans start life
with an innate fascination with nature, but our
culture slowly applies a set of accepted values until
only a few of us remain naturalists, while most
come to view nature as only a resource to be used.
Nat'..Iralists believe that humans cannot live apart
from other organisms with which they co-evolved.
The worth of an organism is found in its contribu-
tion to our understanding of life and not in man's
ability to convert it into food, fiber, money, or
prestige (Janovy 1985).
Examples abound of the mismanagement of bi-
ota in the Mississippi River ecosystem. Mussels
were so numerous at one time in the upper Missis-
sippi and its tributaries that a single bed at New
Boston, Illinois, yielded 10,000 metric tons of
shells in 3 years, representing a hundred million
mussels (Madson 1985). By 1920, 60,000 metric
tons of shells were taken yearly in the United
States. Dam construction began to bury the re-
maining mussel beds by the 1930's, and water
pollution killed many more. By the 1940's "shell-
ing" was a thing of the past (Madson 1985).
In 1908, the Illinois River produced 10% of the
total catch of commercial freshwater fish in the
United States; the annual yield was 10.9 million
kg (198 kg/ha). Intensified floodplain agriculture
and pollution reduced the yield to 43 kg/ha by the
1950's, and to less than 5 kg/ha by the 1970's
(Sparks 1992).

For hundreds of thousands of years melting
western snows and Great Plains' rain storms were
aggressively moving the Rocky Mountains to the
Gulf of Mexico via the Missouri, Arkansas, Red, and
other rivers. In the spring of 1543 DeSoto reported
that Indians were living in trees in Louisiana,
fishing for gar with drowned animals for bait (Reis-
ner 1991). The lower Mississippi River was in full
spring flood and 100 km wide.
The "flaked-off skin of a continent," Reisner
(1991) reminds us, is the reason there is a southern
Louisiana. Dams, levees, and channelization pro-
jects have effectively halted the ancient process of
sediment transport. There were 2.5 million ha of
coastal wetlands in Louisiana 137 years ago. By
1913, Louisiana was losing 18 km2 of wetland an-
nually; by 1946 that figure was 41 km2, and today
it is more than 130. A reduction in the available
sediment supply for delta construction has meant
saltwater intrusion inland from the Gulf of Mexico
(Reisner 1991). Southern Louisiana was the winter
home for 100 million migratory waterfowl, and 80%
of the marine life of the Gulf of Mexico depended on
the Mississippi River delta wetlands. Those wet-
lands are being destroyed, along with upstream
river systems throughout the basin.
The 4.8-million-km2 Mississippi River basin
drains 31 states and includes more than 90 major
river systems. The combined loss offish and wild-
life in this basin from water development projects
and pollution probably exceeds the slaughter of
billions of passenger pigeons and 60 million bison
(Reisner 1991) as an environmental catastrophe.
This symposium was organized to review the
status of fish and wildlife resources of the Missis-
sippi River ecosystem. The objectives were as fol-
lows:

1. to present some of the existing information on
native and introduced fish, methods for survey-
ing the aquatic communities, human impacts,
effects of changes in the geomorphology and
hydrology on the biota, and values associated
with riverine resources throughout the basin;
2. to identify existing or planned actions that
might be useful for fisheries management in
rivers within the basin; and
3. to identify minimal requirements for the resto-
ration of important fmfish and shellfish stocks,
other aquatic resources, and entire ecosystems.

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